Two small fixes for the next patch perhaps

[keith.lamothe]

Yes, I am quite interested in that, because those are the same people who will probably forget to set them to auto-build in the first place without me harassing them, so it'll still end up being my job to maintain that stuff anyway.  That will make my life easier.  Heh.

Well, you'll still have to get them to enable their "Allow Ally Rebuilders To Rebuild My Remains" toggle or your rebuilders won't auto-target their stuff (having a ton of stuff rebuilding can be quite a resource drain, for the owner of the remains).  But to some extent they have to cooperate if you're going to, well, co-operate

[superking]

Minor tangent, I think the economy would be althogether more interesting if power plants were actually expensive to replace.. as is, losing them and lacking a buffer is often just a 100% matter of rapidly building a new one where you have lots of engineers. This also applies to all the factories etc.

[keith.lamothe]

Minor tangent, I think the economy would be althogether more interesting if power plants were actually expensive to replace.. as is, losing them and lacking a buffer is often just a 100% matter of rapidly building a new one where you have lots of engineers. This also applies to all the factories etc.

Yea, I thought about bumping that up, but then it would slow down the early game when you get to the point of needing new reactors... I think that perhaps making it so that engineers cannot assist unbuilt reactors (and thus can't speed build them) could be a step in the right direction, though.

But I don't really think it would actually make the game more fun, per se.  Right now the simple truth of the reactor game is that it's solvable (in a fairly permanent way) once you're past a certain amount of territory, so we're trying to have that solution not take more of a smart player's time/clicks than necessary.

[Philo]

Not to bring this topic to heat again but how about making the reactors more expensive the more you have them? Cumulative costs or whatever it is. Just the initial building cost should rise.

That way the early game will remain the same but later stages losing a reactor will cost you. But then again it won't be a huge hit to your economy since in the late game you should have money rolling in anyway.

[keith.lamothe]

Not to bring this topic to heat again but how about making the reactors more expensive the more you have them? Cumulative costs or whatever it is. Just the initial building cost should rise.

Hmm, that would be tricky from an implementation perspective since we don't have anything like that yet.  Wouldn't be too hard to do but then you run into questions like "if I have 10 energy reactors and lay down construction orders for 20 energy reactors, do they all build at the cost of the 11th reactor, or all build at the cost of the 30th reactor?"  Because it'd be all kinds of pain to have each reactor while-it-was-building (remember that construction costs are paid per-tick) somehow have a different cost based on which one was placed first, etc.  And whichever answer you take to that question incentivizes micro when building the reactors: either you build them all at one time or build them all at once as much as possible.  Neither is something we want to encourage.

[Cyborg]

Not to bring this topic to heat again but how about making the reactors more expensive the more you have them? Cumulative costs or whatever it is. Just the initial building cost should rise.

That way the early game will remain the same but later stages losing a reactor will cost you. But then again it won't be a huge hit to your economy since in the late game you should have money rolling in anyway.

No. Emphatically no. This game is so punishing right now with how much time everything takes. If you think about it, what adds the most emotional weight to the decision-making process is that losing your entire fleet or losing planets is actually a big deal because they cost a lot and that takes time. That is the negative feedback to the player. You could easily extend that to any object in the game, but how fun would that be?

I don't want to see that punishment extended to reactors, especially when losing them pulls down all of your shields. Games usually take just over 10 hours, sometimes up to 20 depending on the level I'm playing at, and I don't really want any more than that because it becomes a slog.

As far as having "a huge hit" to your economy, efficient players like myself are always broke. From a design standpoint, you have to be able to cater to everybody, but if you alienate hard-core players, you probably have a design problem because they are the measure of its depth.

[Philo]

Oh yeah, didn't even think of the auto-build there. Guess not.

Cyborg you seem to think like everyone else is playing this game just sitting at their base. Why I'm usually not totally broke is because I usually first invest my Knowledge into mark III economic CS. And even then I'm mostly broke, hanging around at 100 000 and 0 m/c.
I'm not playing on insanely hard yet, since I haven't played this game enough and usually have to accompany new players as well in my team. Still we play with 6/7 AI with every AI faction turned on. Both hard golems etc.

[Cyborg]

Oh yeah, didn't even think of the auto-build there. Guess not.

Cyborg you seem to think like everyone else is playing this game just sitting at their base. Why I'm usually not totally broke is because I usually first invest my Knowledge into mark III economic CS. And even then I'm mostly broke, hanging around at 100 000 and 0 m/c.
I'm not playing on insanely hard yet, since I haven't played this game enough and usually have to accompany new players as well in my team. Still we play with 6/7 AI with every AI faction turned on. Both hard golems etc.

Here is my assumption: the only way you can actually have a stockpile of resources in this game is if you:

• are playing on a low difficulty, allowing you to take on the AI at your own pace
• are sitting around "massing-" a term often used in RTS games where you build up some mega army
• deleted some really expensive unit or structure, making you rich
• you are at the end of the game and hedging your bets for the final push

If you have a buildup of resources, that means you haven't been particularly aggressive and neither has the AI. A general rule of every RTS I can think of is putting your money to work for you, and if you haven't done so, you're basically playing with less firepower than you could be playing with.

That being said, there is one instance in which I actually try to save resources, and that is going for the avenger and certain Spire campaign plots that can get pretty expensive. That can require a speedy recovery initiative. However, none of these scenarios involve sitting on money for even 1% of the whole game. Going back to your suggestion about making reactors cost more, that is the portion of the game you are usually playing broke with plenty of other things to put your money towards. Also, you didn't address the point about just making the game take longer and distracting you from actually building/going after what is tactically important.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, slowing down the m+c game isn't going to make it more fun for anyone.

I keep coming back to thinking about making so you can't rush-build energy reactors: making energy-raids more of a real vulnerability sounds like it could increase fun... but I think right now it would just make it more obvious that you have to build tons of backup reactors on low-power, which is trivially easy to do.

[Cyborg]

Yea, slowing down the m+c game isn't going to make it more fun for anyone.

I keep coming back to thinking about making so you can't rush-build energy reactors: making energy-raids more of a real vulnerability sounds like it could increase fun... but I think right now it would just make it more obvious that you have to build tons of backup reactors on low-power, which is trivially easy to do.

This would probably just get irritating and make it so that the user builds redundant power supplies somewhere on low-power, thereby increasing micro, providing a money sink, and frustration.